Thursday, May 8, 2014

Water, Water Everywhere...not for forever!

A recent article on Amarillo.com talks about the cities water usage being high already at this time of year. According to the article 80.4 million gallons of water were used in one day! That is 80,400,000 gallons, a lot of water! Being a brewery we take water usage seriously, we have to.

We recycle as much water as we can. The biggest usage of water is the cooling of the wort (unfermented beer) after it has been boiled. We have to cool our wort down as quickly as possible for the best beer possible. At this stage we use a 40 plate chiller, heat exchanger, that chills the wort down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few minutes. Basically it cools the wort as fast as we can pump the wort through it, which happens to be around 3 - 4 gallons a minute. Now the water flow to cool the wort is much faster. In the time it takes to cool the wort we will have used around 50 gallons of water.

Now we don't just send this water down the drain or out into the street, we recycle it! All the chilling water goes into a 330 gallon tank for future use. From this tank the water can be reused for various brewery operations from cleaning to brewing another batch of beer. So we use and reuse the water to the best of our ability. When cleaning we pump water out of the tank and use a pressure washer which uses around 1 gallon a minute. When using the water for another batch of beer it is ran through a filter, to remove any particulate matter, and into the hot liquor tank to be heated.

So we encourage everyone to do their best on conserving this natural resource. Because without it we can't make great beer and we all go thirsty!